cannot write certain binary data to postgresql bytea columns in 2.1.0

Nice patch kim!

I'm going to try applying it and giving it a whirl. One thing I notice right off the bat is your new code assumes unescape_bytea will be defined by the connection, but I know of at least one pg adapter that doesn't implement this method (postgres-pr)

It might be worth keeping part of the old code in a new method, maybe like this:

def non_native_unescape_bytea(value)
                  result = ''
                  i, max = 0, value.size
                  while i < max
                    char = value[i]
                    if char == ?\\
                      if value[i+1] == ?\\
                        char = ?\\
                        i += 1
                      else
                        char = value[i+1..i+3].oct
                        i += 3
                      end
                    end
                    result << char
                    i += 1
                  end
                  result
end

and then in your code you could do something like:

                elsif res.ftype(cell_index) == BYTEA_COLUMN_TYPE_OID
                  row[cell_index] = if PGconn.respond_to?(:unescape_bytea)
                    PGconn.unescape_bytea(row[cell_index])
                  else
                    non_native_unescape_bytea(row[cell_index])
                  end
                end

I spent the better part of a weekend a while back battling with this bug. The solution I came up with was no where near as clean as your patch, so I'm pretty excited to try this out. Thanks again!

I noticed you left string_to_binary alive, but took binary_to_string out. I'm guessing this code is used only when building queries? Is it safe to at least remove the regular expressions from binary_to_string?

I remember I was also going to write a test for this as well, but when I ran the tests I got 6 failures from existing tests, which discouraged me from spending anymore time on it. Were you able to have every single test pass?

Everything I tested out with kim's patch seemed to work

here's a patch that, if applied after kim's patches, allows it to work with postgres-pr

Note to rails committers: It looks like postgres-pr is no longer supported by rails and only ruby-pg and ruby-postgres work anymore. So the patch I submitted to make Kim's patch work with postgres-pr is probably irrelevant at this point.

After reviewing will_paginate, I don't see any reason for it not to work, so I will require more details of the failure. If you'll be at rubyconf 5-8 Nov, I'll be there too.